When I arrived at the client I was visiting that day in Oman, I had to wait in the security hut until someone came to pick me up. The security guard did not speak English but I tried to strike up a conversation anyway. I told him that I had seen camels on my drive there. I could see he did not understand the word camel so I took a pen and paper and drew a picture of a camel. As soon as he recognized what it was I was drawing, he jumped up in the air and shouted “Jamel” (hence I discovered the Arabic word for camel!).

He then grabbed his mobile phone and excitedly showed me pictures of himself with camels. I quickly determined that he owned eight camels and he named them all and from his expressions I realized they were a great source of joy to him. He spoke about them like they were his children and he had pictures where he was kissing and hugging them.

At my meeting, the client was explaining how they wanted to look at utility usage in addition to production line equipment usage over time. Although the production line itself was fully automated, the meter and machine readings were manually read and recorded. We discussed ways that the readings could be captured automatically and fed into a database and displayed and analyzed through a Business Intelligence dashboard. They were very excited about this but when I mentioned how much time this could save the supervisor in the morning since he would not have to collect the information manually any more, the supervisor spoke up. He explained that when he toured the factory floor each morning, he not only collected the meter readings but he spoke to the people on duty and found out if there were any issues or problems over the last 24 hours and gathered a lot of other useful information. He spoke fondly of this responsibility and his relationship with both the workers and the machinery. It actually reminded me of the way the security guard had spoken about his camels.

Interestingly, it was this very supervisor who was the main instigator behind the idea of bringing in business intelligence dashboards to the company. We agreed that there were plenty of other great benefits to automating the data collection into the dashboards without changing his daily factory floor tour. This was an inspired supervisor who loved his job and his company and clearly saw the importance of maintaining both the data analysis and the human action parts of their operation in harmony.

Taking advantage of technology while maintaining the essence of what makes an organization run smoothly creates intelligent and sustainable processes.

The next morning as I was leaving the hotel I saw three camels grazing on the manicured grass in front of the entrance. These are smart camels, I thought – taking advantage of man-made technology to sustain themselves!

Driving down the main 14-lane highway through the center of the city with massive new skyscrapers on each side, I felt like I was in a scene from Disney’s movie Tron.  Outside of rush hours the traffic moves fast and you better keep up or you will end up in an accident. After 45 minutes of speeding through the concrete jungle, I find myself in the middle of desert which is where my first customer that I am visiting is located.

They are a large manufacturer who is planning to double their output capacity in the next two years.  They have big plans and moving fast which is par for the course in this part of the world but they also have a great need for business intelligence to track and analyze in order to make informed decisions. Today they are primarily tracking their strategic objectives and key performance indicators manually and reviewing them monthly with no real visibility on a daily or even weekly basis. Labor intensive manual dashboards are being created in Microsoft Word and printed on poster size charts that sit in managers’ offices.

While the need for automated and visual Business Intelligence using tools like Xcelsius may appear obvious, the main ERP and production applications are still being rolled out and have an even higher priority than BI. In addition, they have defined standards for which technology should be used for their future BI solutions.

After spending time listening to the Project Manager responsible for the current manual dashboards, I realize that the final BI solution will take time and it will need to be implemented step by step and synchronized with all the other projects in progress. To try to fast track the solution would be a mistake and probably lead to inaccurate results which in turn would result to its rejection and demise.

Replacing manual systems with slick BI solutions may lead to dazzling and cool looking visual interfaces but the foundation must be solid and the functionality that exists in the manual system must all be there.

Even in a place like Dubai where massive buildings seem to appear overnight, the foundation and design must be solid or they will all just come crumbling down.

I love Indian food and London offers some of the best around. It has in fact become the National food of Great Britain where there are more Indian restaurants than English ones! Well this turned out to be a very expensive Indian meal because as we returned from the restaurant, there were two police officers waiting for us outside my sister’s house. Apparently, someone had tried to break in through the basement by smashing two windows. The only thing stolen was my laptop which the thieves had pulled out through the window by the power cord.

I say the only thing, but losing my laptop is like losing my right arm. All my presentations, demonstrations and everything for my next two weeks of overseas meetings was on there. I was in a state of disbelief as the police officer took down my statement.

The next morning, I found myself in front of a group of people eagerly awaiting a presentation and demonstration on connected Xcelsius dashboards using the InfoBurst XML Data Cache. So I pulled out my iPad and connected to the projector and showed the whole thing running off the iPad and it all looked and worked just the same. At the end I gave thanks to both Steve Jobs for making this remarkable device and to the InfoBurst development team for making Xcelsius dashboards run on an operating system that does not support Flash.

I was not the only one thanking the InfoBurst development team that day. In the afternoon, I visited a large InfoBurst customer in London who were about to install their third production server license of InfoBurst. They told me that they felt the product had been built just for them and actually thanked InfoSol for creating it!

I took notes at the meeting on my iPad and emailed the InfoBurst development team back in the US all the customer feedback as we adjourned.

In just 24 hours not only had I forgotten about my stolen laptop but I was starting to wonder if I even needed it again.

The first was Xcelsius, the data visualization dashboard tool that rocketed first Business Objects and then SAP to the forefront of business intelligence dashboard solutions. Santiago once told me that the idea for Xcelsius came about after a casual conversation with one of his sons, who was a computer game developer, about making business applications more visual and interactive like computer games. Santiago had created “Gamification” before it had even become a word (according to Wikipedia it was first used in March 2004 several years after Xcelsius was created). Xcelsius was not only ahead of its time, it was a game changer for Business Objects after they acquired the company from Santiago in late 2005 as within two years it was their hottest selling product and was taking over as the user interface of choice for business intelligence.

Roambi Cardex on iPad

After seeing Xcelsius successfully settled into Business Objects, Santiago moved into semi-retirement but his visionary mind could not stop conjuring up new ideas. After seeing a line of people queuing up for an iPhone, he bought one for himself and became intrigued by its visual display capabilities. This led to inspired, revolutionary BI solution number 2. Gathering together some of the original team that had made Xcelsius successful and some very talented developers, he created the most spectacular BI visualization solution ever seen on a mobile device – Roambi. Today, Roambi is the leading BI visualization solution for mobile devices with a plethora of awards and an ever increasing global presence, Some of the Roambi views like Cardex and Squares have got to be seen to be believed (especially on the iPad) – these are designs of pure genius. You can download demo versions for free off the iTunes store.

Roambi Squares on iPad

Needless to say, I was ecstatic when Santiago Becerra agreed to deliver the keynote address at this year’s IBIS 2012 event. With the theme of the conference being Inspired Business Intelligence 2.0, it is a perfect match-up. Few people have contributed more than Santiago to inspiring the world of Business Intelligence.

Equally as exciting, is a new executive seminar track at this year’s IBIS also entitled Inspired Business Intelligence 2.0 that will consist of 12 customer presented case studies on some pretty cool and inspired BI solutions. The final list of customer presentations will be announced in a couple of weeks so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I suggest you reserve a place at IBIS 2012 very soon as the event is limited to just 250 attendees and seats are filling up fast.

Register now.

The race begins and off I go huffing and puffing into the darkness. I have never been a quiet runner and when I exhale you can hear me from 50 yards away. So as I passed a local man who was still celebrating from the night before, I was not surprised when he yelled out “You be blowing like a whale!”

When I staggered across the finish line, I was blowing like a whole school of whales. I headed straight back to the hotel, showered and made my way to the SAP event I was attending.

As SAP executives presented their key initiatives and strategy for 2012, the Cloud was very prominent. While SAP has been a little behind some of the other major software vendors with its Cloud solutions, Bill McDermott, co-CEO said in a recent interview about this very point that SAP was about to ‘unleash the tiger”. So the announcement that SAP is acquiring the human resource management cloud application company SuccessFactors, for $3.4 billion (pending US government approval) is a big part of that tiger. SuccessFactors has a stated 15 million cloud users which is apparently five times more than salesforce.com.

SAP does need some help in this area because their BI cloud offering known as On Demand has not been hugely successful. I believe this is not because companies are not interested in running BI applications based on Crystal Reports, Xcelsius and Web Intelligence in the Cloud, but more to do with the poor return on investment.

Most large software vendors that have created Cloud based applications have made the implementation and annual subscription costs so high that it is difficult to show that they are truly saving money over the equivalent on-premise solution. The same software vendors have created a climate and a culture where they dramatically discount their on premise software (particularly at the end of a quarter) that the Cloud equivalent does not really save any money. This takes away the major reason why companies would choose a Cloud solution.

Unless these software giants wake up and start offering bargain basement pricing for their Cloud solutions and reinstate the most compelling reason to use them, they will lose market share to those new and up-and-coming Cloud application companies that are willing to do so. If that happens, the SAP tiger could quickly turn into a whale that will be blowing the Cloud away.

It is becoming more apparent than ever that the leading BI companies of four years ago (Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion) having been taken over by bigger software application companies (SAP, IBM and Oracle) are losing their leadership position in BI innovation as most of their BI product development effort is focused inwardly to better integrate with their respective owners applications to take advantage of easier sales within their own customer base. They have almost become “legacy BI” solutions along with Microsoft who is quickly falling into the same category. As many industry analysts predicted at the time of these acquisitions, this has made room for new startup companies to fill the void left behind. So during these past few years , we have seen the meteoric rise of Apple with its mobile solutions, Saleforce with its phenomenal cloud based CRM application and Qliktech with its high speed, fast deployment BI solutions.

The BI landscape continues to change at an ever-accelerating pace and I am sure we will be looking at many new names, unheard of today, in a year’s time. In the meantime, here are my top 5 BI predictions for 2012 :

Prediction 1:  Mobile Business Intelligence will start to dominate over conventional business intelligence as companies will demand mobility as a compulsory feature. Mobile workforces will start to replace laptops with iPads (which will be the tablet of choice for businesses in 2012) as more useful and compelling BI solutions are developed for mobile devices. Companies like Mellmo, with Roambi (www.roambi.com), are already well positioned to take advantage of this trend but other strong competitors will emerge in the coming year as more BI dashboard solutions go mobile.

Prediction 2: Cloud based BI applications will propagate like wildfire and the race is on as to who, if anyone, will dominate this space. The question is do any of the BI vendors have the execution capability and the vision to do what Microsoft did to dominate the PC software business or Amazon did to dominate the on-line retail space – namely drop the price so low (or even free) to gain market share at the cost of profit? If not, watch out for iCloud or Google making a play for this huge BI opportunity.

Prediction 3: BI dashboards will continue to thrive but there will be more trend towards Operational BI rather than Strategic BI in 2012. As the capabilities for alerting, write back, connectivity to all types of applications (cloud, internet, on premise, mobile and machine interface) continue to expand, the possibilities and demand for operational BI with dashboard interfaces will too.

Prediction 4: “Big Data” wars will drive more demand for BI. With IBM leading the pack and SAP and Oracle not far behind, I predict a battle on an Exabyte scale as they and others compete as to who can analyze the most data in the fastest time and push it into meaningful BI solutions. The good news for businesses is that this will drive the price of BI tools down (as will the competition from Cloud and Mobile BI solutions).

Prediction 5: Business Intelligence for Web and Social Media content will be super-hot in 2012. The demand to perform BI against unstructured data sources from the web and use BI tools to analyze and visualize will go beyond conventional marketing applications and become an invaluable asset in all areas of business. (Of course, this was the prediction I did not score myself well on in 2011 so I want to go further out on the limb with it this year!).

So let’s see what happens. I am certainly pumped up and excited to see how BI will continue to evolve this year. It is a safe prediction to say that it will evolve for sure but it is usually the unpredictable direction that keeps us (especially me) on our toes. Enjoy the ride.

Prediction 1: Visual Dashboards will remain dominant as the BI User Interface of choice. They will expand beyond their traditional tactical and strategic usage and be seen more in operational BI applications as backend performance with in memory analytics and caching continues to improve. Tools like Xcelsius will increase their presence due to both their visual appeal and ease of use.

Well Visual Dashboards did remain dominant and they certainly did expand into operational BI areas. We saw non-traditional BI functions like “write back” become more used. Xcelsius continued to grow in popularity and usage. I think I scored a 5 out of 5 on this one!

Prediction 2: Data Governance will be a priority as both large and mid-size companies are compelled to accurately consolidate and clean up their data for more relevant and precise business intelligence. Data quality, integration and master data management solutions will become mandatory in many organizations.

Data Governance was a priority with many large companies in 2011 but not so much with mid-size organizations as they tried to navigate a very unpredictable and bumpy economy. Data quality remained important but was still often pushed down the priority list in favor of meeting deliverable deadlines. I think I can only give myself a 2 out of 5 on this one.

Prediction 3: The race for optimal mobile business intelligence solutions will get into full swing. With a plethora of new tablet devices and new BI mobile software products, I anticipate a year of experimentation and we will need to wait another year before the real market leaders are determined. Watch out for Roambi (http://www.roambi.com/) because they are definitely heading in the right direction.

Mobile BI was a big topic in 2011 and a lot of new solutions appeared, both streaming and off-line based applications. Many companies did explore and experiment and some purchased and deployed. We saw many new tablet devices appear and almost as quickly disappear. Apple’s iPad remains the business tablet device of choice while Androids are becoming the most popular mobile smart phones. Roambi increased its presence globally and just released more amazing new views (Layers and Squares) and has become the BI mobile solution to beat. I score myself a 5 out of 5 on this one!

Prediction 4: Relational database Data Marts and Warehouses will continue to be the BI repository of choice in 2011. OLAP cubes will remain a niche market and the new in memory databases are just too immature and too expensive to have a serious impact this year. There will probably be lots of hype but until this new technology is affordable to the masses, it will have minimal effect. Data Mart projects will continue to thrive in the small to medium enterprise space.

Data Marts and Warehouses still remain the BI repository of choice although many companies are looking at a quicker method to deploy their ever-increasing demand for BI analytics. SAP spent a boat load of money, resources and hype promoting their new HANA in-memory analytics solution but there are very few running in live production. As the technology evolves and becomes more commodity that may change. I score 5 out of 5 on this one.

Prediction 5: Business Intelligence for Web and Social Media content will be hot and in demand. The need to perform BI against the predominantly unstructured data sources of the web has never been greater as more business and institutions both grow their web presence and web driven marketing. BI tools and solutions that can quickly analyze this data both quantitatively and qualitatively will see fast growth and adoption in 2011.

Using BI against Web and social media content has grown in 2011 but it has not been as hot as I was predicting. I have read several articles this year about success stories in this area but I have actually encountered very few first hand. The tools to analyze the unstructured content are good but are still relatively expensive and require a lot of services (more expensive). Maybe that will change in the next year or so. I can only score myself a 1 out of 5 for this one.

So my final grade is a 72% which according to my daughter in High School is only a “C”. Well I will have to do better than that so stand by for my 2012 BI predictions coming in the next few weeks.

The high speed ferry boats in Oman are very similar. Sitting at the front, you do not think you are going fast but if you go to the back of the boat and see the giant wake being left by the multiple powerful engines, you quickly realize you are moving faster than most speedboats.

So I find myself on this super fast ferry on my way to the port of Sohar in the North of Oman to visit the Sohar Aluminum Plant, one of the largest in the Gulf region. We are taken on a fascinating tour of the entire manufacturing process producing tons of aluminum ingots as its end product. The plant is only about three years old and is fully automated, efficient and clean.  It employs over a thousand people and boasts an impressive track record of productivity. The company puts safety first as its top priority and has not recorded a single injury in over 730 days – impressive. In addition, the company has put together a Corporate Social Responsibility program that both encourages input from the workers and gives back to the local community.

In the middle of the tour, one of the Sohar Aluminium supervisors is explaining the key metrics that their particular area is measured by and one of the other visitors makes a remark that management never really looks at that type of detail, they are just interested in the final production numbers. The supervisor immediately responds saying that is definitely not the case at Sohar Aluminium because they have a Business Intelligence dashboard that is viewed daily throughout the company by everybody which shows all their key performance indicators and how they are doing against their daily, weekly, monthly and annual goals.

Everybody in the organization is looking at the same data and they can see the metrics for other areas. This has created a remarkable culture change in the company as everyone has visibility to these metrics and realizes that their daily actions actually influence the numbers and values that they are seeing every day.  The fact that the dashboard is built in Xcelsius with visually compelling dynamic visibility features and is simple and intuitive to use has also played a big part in the successful user adoption.

Displaying the metrics was only a part of the Sohar Aluminium dashboard solution.  One of the biggest challenges facing the company was getting the shift supervisors and others responsible for the metrics to enter the actual values into the system in a timely fashion. They solved this problem by extending Xcelsius using InfoBurst to create a data input dashboard so the data can be entered through the dashboard itself. This dashboard not only displayed what metrics were missing but it also triggered an alert email that was sent to the supervisor if the data was not entered within 15 minutes of the end of the shift.  If the data had still not being entered within 30 minutes, then a second alert in red was sent to the supervisor again and the General Manager for that area was automatically copied.  This has been incredibly effective as the company has seen almost no late entries since the system was implemented earlier this year.

The dashboard is packed with many more innovative features and you can read about many of them in this PDF of the case study.

Sohar Aluminium was so happy about its KPI dashboard that they have continued to add to it and have even created an operational dashboard that takes direct feeds from temperature and wind speed gauges that are dynamically refreshed every minute. If the recommended thresholds are exceeded, which is not unusual since their plant is located in the Omani desert, then alerts flash up on the dashboard as well as sent directly to the relevant supervisor’s Blackberry phone to tell them to stop certain operations that would be unsafe.

So just like the racing camels and high speed ferry, Sohar Aluminium has covered a lot of distance in a very short period of time. Their initial dashboard solution was developed and operational in just four weeks.

When I presented this case study in a keynote at a conference this week sponsored by large Gulf Aluminium industry leaders, there was a lot of interest and I would not be surprised if, in the future, Oman will be as well known for its innovative dashboards as for its racing camels!

I went to dinner with two of my colleagues from InfoSol, Amy and Teresa, who live and work out of Portland. Teresa was halfway through a two week engagement delivering Xcelsius design consulting services at a client in Oakland, California. She loves her weird home town of Portland so much that she flew back for the weekend.

So I asked her how the project was going and she casually answered, “Fine but it has been difficult to eat out some nights and get some sleep”.  Teresa then explained that the hotel she was staying at is less than a block from City Hall, downtown Oakland where the local Occupy Wall Street movement has been camping out and where things got a little out of control this week.

So the night the trouble started, she was walking down the street heading  for a restaurant when she ran into a solid wall of Oakland police officers decked out in full riot gear. She turned back and stopped in at a Subway to get a take-out sandwich to bring back to the hotel.  She tried to hurry the guy making the sandwich but those “sandwich artists” take their work seriously. As she was paying she saw streams of protesters heading past the Subway in the direction of the riot police and then all hell broke loose as she heard explosions (probably flash bang grenades). By the time she got outside, it looked like a war zone and she scurried back to the hotel.

There was little peace there due to the three police helicopters hovering outside her hotel room on the 26^thfloor making sleep almost impossible.  Then, just as she thought she might doze off, there was an earthquake causing the building to both shake and sway.

I sat there, hardly believing what I was hearing. Most people would have just packed up and gone home at that point but Teresa delivered her first week of services and will be back again this week to deliver the rest.

Last month another InfoSol consultant, Simon, was delivering Data Integrator services in Washington DC when an earthquake caused the ventilator in the middle of the room to come crashing down. Fortunately nobody was hurt and he finished the services in another location after the building was evacuated.

Wow – this kind of dedication is nothing short of inspirational. Teresa and Simon – you rock!

Citing examples from companies like Zappos, Dr. McGonigal quite convincingly explained how games create positive emotions like joy, relief, love surprise, pride, curiosity, awe, contentment, creativity and excitement. Judging by my own teenage son’s reaction after playing World of Warcraft or Call for Duty, I might add a couple more emotions to that list.

A recent study estimated that people around the world spend a total of 3 billion hours a week playing online games alone which certainly would indicate that we like playing games. At the same time, the cost for not being positive in the workplace has been estimated to cost businesses around $300 billion a year. McGonigal explained that the opposite of play is not work but depression and that games can help to create “super empowered, hopeful individuals” and make work more fun than fun!

We then played a game of “massively multiple player Thumb Wrestling” to show how playing games gets our oxytocin flowing and makes us feel good and I must admit that I left the session pretty upbeat but with some sore thumbs!

The next day it rained – a rare occurrence for Las Vegas and I got pretty wet running to the Starbucks to get my wakeup fix. The detour made me late for the first keynote so I ran across the bridge from the Starbucks to the Venetian which was not very smart on that slippery surface. About half way across, I saw my feet appearing at the same height as my chest and my butt was the next part of my body to strike the ground. I had but one thought – “Save the Café Mocha”!  It was in my right hand which I held high and upright and despite some nasty bruises and soaking wet pants, the Mocha was saved.

I entered the keynote dripping wet and sore but triumphant (Mocha in hand) as I watched a video of Hasso Plattner declaring once again how SAP has reinvented itself in terms of technology through HANA. The theme was continued with several case studies and video testimonies, including showing how HANA can analyze a boat load of data faster than someone can bake a cake. It was all very similar to Sapphire four months earlier. Interestingly, a quick show of hands in the audience of over 4,000 indicated that less than 2% of attendees were considering HANA in the next 12 months.

There was some mention of Sybase and Sybase IQ with an impressive established install base of customers.

Then there were breakout sessions galore although, like Sapphire, not that many on BusinessObjects.

One session that I did find very interesting was entitled “Pervasive Location Analytics” which was an intriguing look at the growing significance of the location dimension in data and how Google, in particular, have had a big influence on this. There was a fascinating case study shown where the Guardian Newspaper in the UK  (www.Guardian.co.uk) used location analytics to determine if poverty was a factor in the recent riots in the UK. By layering the locations where the riots occurred and arrests were made with the location of the addresses of those arrested with a heat map of the average income level of those areas, they were able to see a correlation.

The presenter mentioned that SAP has recently signed a 3-year deal with Google to use Google Maps and other Google location API’s with its applications and they had also signed a partnership agreement with Centigon Solutions (www.CentigonSolutions.com) to use and resell their Google Maps plug-in for Xcelsius dashboards.

Like Sapphire, TechEd is just too big with too much going for me. It is hit or miss on the sessions (some useful, some not). I am not sure if I will go next year but, if I do, I will definitely avoid playing thumb wars and running on wet slippery bridges.

If you are interested in the idea of gamification, here’s a TED talk from Feb 2010 by Jane McGonigal on how Gaming Can Make a Better World.